In lean times it is perfectly natural that the struggle for daily bread be all-consuming, the mind cannot live without the body, but amidst the potential of near effortless abundance we are exhorted time and again to get to work. Why?

This weekend gone I was happy to sign a petition objecting to the Adani development in the Galilee basin. The information given me at my local farmers market accurately reported on a number of concerns relevant to the Adani project. At the heart of the protest lay the concern about the environmental impacts of the mine. The commitment of those involved in these campaigns is admirable, and I sense that the public is increasingly receptive to environmental issues. However, in my view the strategy of the environmental movement is critically incomplete.

In 2009 the national debt was $101 000 000 000. By April this year it had blown out to $551 000 000 000 with an annual interest bill of about $16 000 000 000 to come out of taxation or more interest bearing finance. The interest alone works out to about $672 for every person in this country or $2500 for a family of four. And there seems no letup in sight. Australia’s debt ceiling is projected to climb to $600 000 000 000.

Literally speaking bullshit is a rather useful material. In the hands of someone who knows what to do with it bullshit can be placed in beneficial association with other materials to be cooked down to a humus rich environment perfectly conducive to the proliferation of beneficial soil life. If you are a food producer, then it is worth your while to pay careful attention in its treatment so you might increase your productivity. As Alex Podolinsky said ‘the cow is an extremely important animal’, a good part of that observation being attributable to the quality of bulls’ shit. Besides being great for soil health you can cook with it, turn it into electricity, or, in a pinch, build a house with it. It is an appreciation of its usefulness that is in large part responsible for the cow’s sacredness amongst a considerable proportion of the world’s population.

You should probably know that the literal meaning of mortgage is ‘death pledge’. According to the Australian debt clock we owe 1,647,386,800,000 dollars to banks as housing debt. It's about 90% of all household debt in this country and it is accumulating faster than GDP. In its March 2017 Monetary Policy Meeting the Reserve Bank noted that household debt was rising faster than household income.

It is usually the public’s want of restraint that is blamed for the worsening private debt problem; hedonistic public needs to tighten its belt and stop living beyond its means. Bad, pampered public. Mainstream reporting on Australia’s private debt level goes out of its way to avoid making clear one crucial aspect of what is driving it. This money that people are borrowing is required to run the economy. We have explored in detail how the money we use everyday is created by banks when people borrow. The primary concern of finance is how to induce people to borrow enough money to keep the economic system jerking along. The fact is if we didn’t borrow so much money we’d be berated for lack of faith (confidence in financial terms) and the economic pundits would be decrying the next round of crisis, depression, recession, downturn or whatever word their employer's banker told them to use.

Readers of this blog will know that when money is loaned, a deposit is created in the borrower’s account which did not exist before. It is in every way new money. The bank also registers the amount as a debt owed to them, and it is the obligation of the borrower to repay it plus interest and charges. The money that is created will cycle through the economy facilitating trade and will disappear from the scene as it is repaid. The health of the economy depends upon sufficient credit in cycle. When credit levels are too low we call it a recession or depression depending upon the severity of the dearth of credit.

With this process in mind we can examine the mortgage system more clearly. With the dismantling of Australia’s manufacturing sector and the public’s disapproval of increasing national debt, private lending is becoming an increasingly important wedge of the credit pie, and the mortgage is far and away the largest contributor of credit in this category. From a macro-economic perspective, this is why every effort is made to maximise the amount of money borrowed against property.

From the loans officer who decides how much a borrower will get, to the incentives offered to speculators to invest in property, from the ubiquitous real estate publication and renovation TV trend promising ‘the lifestyle you deserve’ to the weak foreign investment regulations guaranteed to inflate prices in the most sought after areas in the country, the financial establishment, including the treasury department, ensures a continual stream of mortgage applicants and debt money contracts to inflate the national money supply.

You might say that the real estate bubble has become a necessary feature of financial management because, under the present system, there wouldn’t be money in our pockets for bread and milk without one. It is a corner of an absurd system that institutionalises the practice of gearing up into the distant future in order to enable consumption in the present.

The fraud is that the banks have been empowered to monetise the real wealth of the community and use it as a lever to sustain a faulty financial system reaping huge rewards in the process. Under these arrangements money is a liability to society, not an asset. If you didn’t borrow directly the money in your pocket somebody else did. That somebody is now required to do things in order to pay it back. For all the money cycling in society there are corresponding obligations to banks making demands on peoples’ time and energy. When the failure to meet these obligations leads directly into homelessness you can be sure they take precedence over all other things. It is largely via the mortgage system, the tying of land to debt, that the banks have been able to elevate their demands on the energies of the community into the number one position.

The problem here is the problem that runs through the whole economy. Generally put, the real economy is being forced to conform to an abstract financial economy in an attempt to constrict the reality of abundance into a control matrix based on the illusion of scarcity. After food and clothes, it is peoples’ first consideration that they have somewhere decent to live and it should be the priority of the land market to facilitate availability of this human need. But, at this time, that is not the objective of the land market. Rather the first objective of the land market is the creation of debt that controls peoples’ behaviour from day to day, and secondly, to enable the fat profits of an interested coterie consisting of bankers, lawyers, government and real estate agents who operate the scam. It was C.H. Douglas who warned that funding economies by means of loan credit would progressively mortgage the wealth of the community to the banks. The financial position of Australia’s banks and the consequent indebtedness of her citizenry bear out his predictions.

The idea that the distribution of land can be arranged in no other way than the contraction of increasingly onerous debt constitutes a serious lack of imagination on the part of economists and politicians and the grandest confidence trick of our time. Access to soil, air and water is the right of every living thing and an organisation that insists people only have access to it via the assent of banks, other official agents and the laws that protect their rackets is perhaps the paramount modern absurdity. Douglas defined the function of money as ‘that which enlists the cooperation of the community and the use of its assets’ which, under present settings, cannot ultimately be got at by anyone without first lining the pockets of a banker. This absurdity becomes painfully clear upon common sense examination of the death pledge industry.

If the banks and their records mercifully disappeared down well-placed sink holes the biggest problem we’d face would be congestion in the best parts of our towns. But, in this new world of people relieved of their duties to banks, if we continued to insist that we didn’t need to know anything about the money system it is a certainty that in a little while we would once again find ourselves yoked to the debt finance methods of banks.

It is not without irony that access to land that would make us free has become the chain around our ankle. The mortgage system in Australia and the world over is an instrument of mass dependency. A better mechanism for the establishment of the servile state could hardly be imagined.

We have pledged $1,647,386,800,000 and counting. Till death do us part

This week Scott Morrison warned that unless the federal government can find 13.2 billion dollars in savings by the release of the May budget then Australia risks losing its AAA credit rating.

Predictably this has sparked discussion about where the money is to come from with Morrison talking about possible tax increases and the government questioned about the likelihood of some of the savings coming from changes to Australia’s capital gains tax policy.

The situation highlights the influence of international finance on domestic policy. At a time when the government is putting together a May budget with a focus on cost-of-living pressures for families, including housing affordability and energy costs, it is compelled to consider the apparently more urgent goal of maintaining its credit rating at the people’s expense. Why is this so?

Having reviewed Australia’s financial position in December 2016 and after dciding to leave us with our AAA rating, Moody’s commented that ‘The government's decision to maintain the objective of a balanced budget by 2020-21 denotes continued commitment to fiscal consolidation.’ This means that the government’s cost of borrowing would not increase, and they would be allowed to talk seriously about their financial prudence so long as they continued to screw down the public with tax measures.

The ratings system is a critical link that enables the international financial setup proxy control over national policy. Combined with the tax system that links by decree the peoples’ purse to governments’ sticky fingers, the ratings agencies link government coffers to the requirements of private, and increasingly international, lenders. Because Australiadoes not have a money supply of her own her elected government must continually appeal to the banks for loans. The banks secure the loans against government taxation and spending programs and if found suitable, will lend money. If not, the ratings agency punishes governments with downgrades and increasingly expensive credit. It is a supernational mechanism that dilutes the power of elected national leaders to respond to the needs of the community, and more evidence, if any were needed, of the farce of ballot-box democracy.

This mechanism provides the moneylenders with the power they need to further three immediate aims of the international elites; the cutting of social spending, the privatisation of national assets and the opening of national resources and markets to the exploitation of international, private entities. Any government that prioritises the domestic at the expense of the international can expect damning criticism from a banking owned public information system. An ever-present threat that guarantees the obedience of an insipid political class more concerned with their careers as politicians than the sound management of public affairs and material economies.

What do we do about it? As a point of departure, we must understand perfectly what Douglas meant when he said:

The essence of the fraud is the claim that the money they (the banks - WW) create is their own money, and the fraud differs in no respect in quality but only in its far greater magnitude, from the fraud of counterfeiting … May I make this point clear beyond all doubt? It is the claim to the ownership of money which is the core of the matter. Any person or organisation who can create, practically at will, sums of money equivalent to the price values of the goods produced by the community is the virtual owner of these goods, and therefore, the claim of the banking system to the ownership of the money which it creates is a claim to the ownership of the country.

A discussion about the operation of the financial system needs to be forced. That does not mean a discussion about the corruption and greed of banking CEOs. It does not mean a discussion about how to regulate banks to do a better job in the present system. With this system a good job cannot be done. The money system must be brought into line with the economic facts. The wealth of the community is being progressively transferred via mortgage to a small group of people who control the monopoly of credit. This is happening because the system was designed by them for this purpose. If we take away this monopoly power to create the money supply as debt we will have neutralised the critical instrument that facilitates the centralisation of control which constitutes the fundamental problem of modern organisation.

For those that take more than a passing interest in world affairs we have before us an array of pieces. We see the problems of poverty and social unrest and we lament the damage that we are doing to nature. We struggle to come to grips with how to assimilate advances in technology and the unemployment problem which it promises to make increasingly acute. We are constantly being squeezed by rising costs of living, taxation and inflation and of course we wonder why everybody is in debt. We see the vast capacity of industry, shops full with products they can’t sell and we hear the incessant drone of the advertiser.

Our physical and mental health is suffering. Our families are under strain. Many of us are isolated from the communities where we live.

We get no answers from leadership. Politics makes no sense and our economic advice comes from banks of various stripes who are obviously concerned with lining their own pockets at our expense. On top of all this there is an overarching move toward what Clifford Hugh Douglas described as the ‘development of world dominion': the centralisation of power.

We can see the picture this puzzle will make when put together is pretty bleak. Many of us have decided to give up on assembling it at all, having resigned ourselves to the idea that the world doesn’t make sense and thinking ‘what can I do about it anyway?’ Others focus all of their attention on just one piece, but the world does fit together and there is no lasting improvement that will come from addressing symptoms only.

A careful study of Douglas’ ideas, otherwise known as Social Credit, will do a few things for you. It will suggest a new configuration and provide some sorely needed pieces you have been encouraged to ignore. Then once you have things in the right place you'll see that his remedy of providing economic security directly to the individual would neutralise the effects of irresponsible power by allowing each of us the freedom to better mind our own business.

For those of you who give this a look I have this advice. When you do a big puzzle, and this is a big one, you get every piece face up and in its own space. You get the edges together, group the like colours and patterns and so on. But to do all this organising you need space.

To figure this through you will need space also; mental space. It is the prejudices and preconceptions instilled over a lifetime of conditioning that are the biggest hindrance to the proper comprehension of the tangle we find ourselves in. Some of these include the belief in the crooked nature of man, Malthusian notions of economic scarcity, the neutral role of money, faith in partisan expertise, an unwillingness to face the role of conspiracy in modern history, the false paradigm of left right politics, puritanical attitudes about work and the fear of leisure. It is important to understand that these positions are not matters of fact. For many these notions are ideological templates that decide the acceptability of new information. They are Power’s attempt to superimpose a world they can control over the real world, and so long as we accept these precepts we will be unable to see the world as it is and the solutions to our problems will remain out of reach.

In the advanced industrial societies the problem is typically approached by a variety of measures to deprive democratic political structures of substantive content, while leaving them formally intact. A large part of this task is assumed by ideological institutions that channel thought and attitudes within acceptable bounds, deflecting any potential challenge to established privilege and authority before it can take form and gather strength.

Likewise, the role of thought control as a means of maintaining power was not lost on Douglas when he wrote Economic Democracy in 1920 -

We are, therefore, faced with an apparent dilemma, a world-wide movement towards centralised control, backed by strong arguments as to the increased efficiency and consequent economic necessity of organisation of this character, and, on the other hand, a deepening distrust of such measures bred by personal experience and observation of their effect on the individual. A powerful minority of the community, determined to maintain its position relative to the majority, assures the world that there is no alternative between the pyramid of power based on toil of ever-increasing monotony, and some form of famine and disaster; while a growing and ever more dissatisfied majority strives to throw off the hypnotic influence of training and to grapple with the fallacy which it feels must exist somewhere.

As we ‘grapple with the fallacy’ we must keep in mind that it is largely the ‘hypnotic influence of training’ that we struggle against. We must allow ourselves the mind space to configure the pieces of the puzzle in ways our programmed ideas would not previously allow. We must allow space for something new. Social Credit reveals the order behind the chaos and clears the way to a healthier society.

The issue of work is always a sticking point with people trying to comprehend the Social Credit position. When it’s all boiled down all we are saying is that when it comes to work people should be allowed to exercise the choice that progress would undoubtedly make possible if it weren’t for a financial setup that prohibits it.

We take a neutral positon on work in that we believe there is good and bad work. If you’re a bulldozer driver chain clearing rainforest we would all be better off if you could stay home and paint pictures, compose music, glug beer or do nothing at all. It is difficult to argue against the statement that there is a hell of a lot of work that shouldn’t be done but those who do bad work will fight bitterly to continue to do it for the sake of the income it provides. As Oliver Heydorn wrote ‘there is nothing irreducibly positive about paid work.’

With respect to the non-economic advantages of work; avoiding depression, status and social connections, these things can be obtained in other spheres outside the economy. I agree that being a useful person is an edifying condition. But if in a Social Credit society somebody felt depressed or isolated they would be free to work if they thought that the best way to deal with their malaise. There are plenty of jobs to do. Actually, it is fair to say that is it largely financial arrangements that make us so time poor resulting in much necessary work remaining undone. Social Crediters don’t propose stopping anyone from working, but we do object to an organisation like the Reserve Bank of Australia manipulating the money system in pursuit of a policy of full employment which they are bound to fail at in increasingly spectacular fashion. An objective, I should add, that comes before ‘the economic prosperity and welfare of the people of Australia.’ Check it out for yourself at their website http://www.rba.gov.au/about-rba/our-role.html.

Despite a persistent call for work if we are honest it is actually money people want, not work. If you asked people whether they would prefer five hundred a week gratis or a job that paid five hundred a week I am confident in the prediction that the majority would choose the former. The point is that people don’t involve themselves in work in the first place to feel good. People work because they consider it the best way to get for themselves the physical necessities for living and then, if they’re lucky, some luxuries. The startling contradiction that these things are getting easier and cheaper to produce and the average person is having to work harder and longer to secure them is an indictment on an economic system that continues to paternalistically maintain as a priority the insistence on work as a moral principle.

Present financial arrangements ensure we are a long way off being serious about a ‘just’ economy. There exists very real, degrading poverty and insecurity amidst the plenty of the industrialised nations and it is the intention of Social Credit to deal with it directly. I think it is an egregious diversion when leadership and the media moralise about employment instead of addressing the suffering of people.

Morality aside the failure to distribute the product of the machine is having catastrophic effects and it is this destructive disorganisation that Social Crediters object to first. Quigley reports that in 1830 United States industry expended six million BTU per capita. A hundred years later it was 245 million BTU. Lord knows what it is today. Of course the increase is due to the utilisation of inanimate sources of energy and the result is a lot of stuff for sale and an edging out of labour as a factor in production. Far from abating, this trend has accelerated.

I have recently read Veroufakis’ book The Global Minotaur and he makes some interesting points relevant to this discussion. At the end of the Second World War the United States pursued what he describes as The Global Plan. Its twin pillars were the economic restoration of Germany and Japan through means of massive finance and industrial assistance. The planners did not decide on this course out of the goodness of their hearts. Veroufakis says they did this in order to build in what he calls a Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM). The realisation after the war was that there could never be enough demand generated in the United States to consume America's post-war industrial output. The solution was to build Germany and Japan as a marketplace for the output of American heavy industry. Additionally, the farsighted (or short-sighted) planners understood that to maintain this GSRM Japan and Germany would require similar zones in which to sell their product once they were up and running.

If Veroufakis is right, and it stands to reason, the economic design for the post war world came out of the disequilibrium unavoidable in industrial economies that create money like we do. As I said the US didn’t do this out of sympathy for their recent enemies. They did it because they couldn’t imagine a system that would allow the Americans an extra day off and be paid for it. They couldn’t see how they could at the same time increase effective demand (get people incomes) and not do work.Or, perhaps more precisely, they couldn’t imagine the banks allowing them to make credit that wasn’t attached to debt and therefore didn’t require an ongoing obligation to make things.

The truth is that we can’t keep running industry at full tilt and avoid catastrophe, both social and environmental. Douglas said ‘if you put all the men to work on all the machines you get a surplus that only the organised destruction of war can deal with.’ Furthermore, the mechanical and polluting power of industry to do damage to the natural world makes it vital that we only use it carefully. Seriously, we are at the point when knocking off early is becoming a matter of survival of the species.

In his essay In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russel once wrote ‘the morality of work is the morality of slaves and the modern world has no need of slavery.’ Just think about it.

There is a debate going on beneath the nonsense of mainstream economic discussion. The contenders are agreed on one important point; that a better distribution of wealth is the solution to our economic woes and the road to a more functional society. As Martin Luther King said ‘it is now incontestable that the wealth and resources of the United States make the elimination of poverty absolutely practical.’ This is true throughout the industrial world and could be true everywhere.

Any Social Crediter who knows his stuff will be able to tell you that while the plan for Social Credit is difficult to get across this is not the real problem. We can describe how the thing would come together to anyone with an attention span more than 15 minutes and a will to know. It seems that the real problem lies in convincing people that human nature could handle it without rending society limb from limb.

Clearly the satisfaction of citizens’ material needs is not the objective of the present economic order. Australians will be painfully aware that the purpose of economics is ‘jobs and growth’ or, in other words, compounding economic activity.

With the closure of the Electrolux factory in Orange this country has surrendered for the time being her will to make fridges.The usual lament is heard; unemployment, the end of an era, and the standard reason trotted out about which nothing can be done; Australia cannot be competitive when it comes to manufacturing.

The scientific approach to the problem of the supply of material requirements is probably the most remarkable feature of modern society. The success of science in disclosing the relationship between matter and energy, and the practical application of this knowledge, comes with responsibilities unattended up to this time.

The Social Credit discussion tends to be dominated by the technical economic considerations. In the back and forth about how the direction of the system can be changed to deliver sufficient purchasing power to individuals the philosophical underpinnings of Social Credit, why the system ought to be changed, can be eclipsed.

I don’t know about you but our economic problems have kept me awake at night. In the small hours I lie there turning over the dilemma finding the solution only to find I’ve created another impossible tangle. The other night the solution came to me and I want to test it in this public space.

It is possible that Social Crediters come across as a one track record. The track is called ‘the gap’. I suspect that word is something like a trigger that launches the social crediter into as good an explanation as he is capable of the fault with the financial system; a trigger to which I am not immune. Excuse me.

Douglas claimed the purpose of Social Credit is to ‘release reality’ with respect to human activity, which means releasing people from artificial constraints. I suspect it was a frustration to him that people became increasingly preoccupied with the money question which was a limited policy based on a much more inspiring, subversive philosophy of real liberty and personal responsibility.

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